Syria: The Killing Field the World is Learning to Live With

But when you use your clout to make sure no one else will hire me, that is another matter entirely. That's called blacklisting and is totally wrong in my book.

If a black man in the south, back in the day when the KKK was burning and lynching, was murdered by the Klan, and you had used your clout to make sure he couldn't buy a gun anywhere [because black people commit crimes or whatever reason you thought "reasonable"] I would consider you as something like an accessory to that murder. I would also consider you as objectively a friend of the Klan and an enemy of black people.

Now, if you want to understand why I am so hard on President Obama on this matter, it is because he represents the United States, and US policy now is to deny people being bombed, weapons with which they could defend themselves.

I have shown in my other diaries that the people being bombed would most likely have effective surface-to-air missiles by now, except for the interference of the United States.

Kossacks objected to the picture of a young girl that had her head blown off in Syria over the weekend so I took it down. Well you should know that 3 more little girls were killed in Aleppo today by a Syrian jet that could afford to make slow, low passes over the apartment building that was his target because he knew the people on the ground had no way to get at him.

That would not be the case except for CIA agents in Turkey, on President Obama's orders, that are making sure that Syrian jet won't meet an effective defense from the ground.

Don't worry, I won't post pictures of those little girls here, so unlike their friends and family, you won't have to look at their mutilated bodies. But you should, you really should, because in stopping those that could have defended those little girls from being able to do so, the United States is intervening in the Syrian Civil War, and all of us now have the blood of those little girls on our hands.

3:29 PM PT: I apologize for the photo and the outrage it has caused. I only wish that there was more outrage that this little girl was murdered (along with hundreds of other innocent Syrians) over this past weekend.

I also wish that I couldn't say that I have done more to publicize the slaughter of the Syrian people in the Daily Kos, than all the other Kossacks combined, but I'm afraid that is the case.

It seems that most people don't just don't want to see or hear what is being done to our fellow human beings by the Assad government.

I see very few other Kossacks bringing the horror of the state organized slaughter to the readers here, either with or without graphics, they just want it to go away.

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing

I may not always do the do the right thing, but I refuse to do nothing.

I guess I thought I could shock people out of their apathy. I see now that I was mistaken. People are clearly far more angry about what I have done in publicizing what was done to this little girl than they are about what was done to this little girl, and I think that is a shame.

Bashar Assad's forces may be moving incrementally to avoid shocking the international community. But towns are watching the toll of quiet executions mount.
September 15, 2012

DARIYA, Syria â As he hid from soldiers in a field next to his neighborhood, a young man watched as a cat wandered down a street. Suddenly, it was shot dead. That's when Zuhair noticed the sniper on a nearby roof.

But a father and son walking along the street didn't see the gunman, Zuhair said. The sniper lowered his head and peered through his scope.

He shot the boy first. As the man tried to grab his son, who looked to be about 10, he was shot as well.

The two are among a reported 700 victims of snipers, shelling and summary executions, most of them men, since forces loyal to President Bashar Assad stormed the Damascus suburb of Dariya in late August, one in a growing list of Syrian towns and villages that briefly enter the world's spotlight, only to be replaced by another one when a new mass killing is committed.

Unlike a massacre by government forces three decades earlier in the city of Hama, which left more than 20,000 dead in just three weeks and still haunts the country, the reported atrocities have been spread over months of bloodshed in Syria. That has led some to call the government campaign a kind of slow-motion Hama.

Late last year, as the government siege of the city of Homs was underway, activists began tweeting: "Homs 2011 = Hama 1982, but slowly, slowly." As the conflict becomes more bloody on both sides, the same can be said for the entire country.

"They killed them in one sweep [in Hama]; with us, it's in stages," said Um Hussam, a mother of five who runs a small convenience shop in an old neighborhood of Dariya. "We expected they would kill and terrorize people, but not to this â¦ level of barbarity."

After videos of children's bodies emerged after a massacre of 108 people in the town of Houla in May, there was brief international outcry, and several Western countries expelled their Syrian ambassadors and diplomats. Less than two weeks later in the town of Qubair, 78 were killed and United Nation monitors were fired upon when they first tried to visit the village. More...

The first peaceful protest in Syria in January 2011 was directed not at the regime of Bashar al-Assad but against that of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Protestors gathered in front of the Egyptian embassy, heavily armed with candles (provided by the Central Intelligence Agency, no doubt) and placards that said “yes for freedom” (in the background) and “no for killing the Egyptian youth” (in the foreground).

This innocuous solidarity demonstration was squashed by the Assad regime.

Evidently the thirst for political freedom is highly contagious, and the Syrian people had to be protected from it at all costs, including their lives.

Stamping out peaceful protests by force — the tried and true method of the Assad regime ever since Hama in 1982 — succeeded at first but failed in the long run. In March of 2011, children who wrote anti-government slogans on walls in Dara’a were detained, beaten, and tortured. This barbaric act, the first of many to come, sparked what is rightly considered the beginning of the Syrian uprising.

Not long after, in April 2011, the regime handed the broken body of 13-year-old Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb to his parents sans genitals, dignity, and life. His crime?

Attending a peaceful protest in Jiza.

A year and a half later after that first protest in Damascus over 21,000 have been killed. Unknown numbers have been tortured, raped, killed, and mutilated by the regime. Over 250,000 Syrian refugees now live in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, and Iraq.

What began as Gandian-style peaceful protests (modeled on those that shook Tahrir Square) became militarized and bloody only after the regime unleashed wave after wave of executions and sadistic reprisals the likes of which would have made Hitler’s stomach churn. After months of murderous repression, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) formed in summer of 2011 when soldiers ordered to shoot innocent and defenseless protestors decided to turn their guns around.

People who bemoan the FSA’s human rights violations from the safety of their couches while remaining mum about the regime’s criminal acts that drove them to arms in the first place cannot comprehend what Malcolm X meant when he said: “sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the gun down.”

While Syrian children like Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb were being tortured, killed, and mutilated by the Syrian government, what was U.S. President Barack Obama doing? Playing footsie with that very same government, trying to salvage dirty deals two years in the making aimed at throttling the Palestinians and Hezbollah in Lebanon once and for all in a grand bargain for Middle East “peace.”

Of course Obama is not prescient nor is he a psychic. He could not have known about Al-Khateeb’s suffering as it was actually happening. But as the pile of bodies grew too high to hide and the atrocities too gruesome, heinous, and well-documented to ignore, on May 19, 2011 Obama called on Assad, who he said had “chosen the path of murder,” to “lead” Syria’s transition to democracy .

So while the Syrian people paid in blood for saying the regime must go, Washington said that the regime must stay. Three months later, Obama reluctantly concede that his negotiation partner Assad must step down, but his administration steadfastly insisted that the security, police, and military killing machine that is slaughtering civilians stay in place without the old boss Bashar. Obama’s Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta put it this way: âThe best way to preserve … stability is to maintain as much of the military and police as you can, along with security forces, and hope that they will transition to a democratic form of government.”

Hope! The administration whose governing philosophy might best described as “the audacity of nope” hopes that the rapists, murderers, and torturers of the Syrian people will some day lead their victims out of the bloody, hellish nightmare they created to the land of democracy, human rights, and rule of law. Of course the Obama administration is neither stupid nor naÃ¯ve enough to seriously think that the Syrian state machine will develop a conscience, but Assad-ism without Assad is without a doubt their preferred outcome at this point.

Obama Says No to Intervention

The Obama administration is trying to mend, not end, the murderous Assad regime. Once you understand that, you can see why:

The U.S. responded so differently to similarly murderous rampages by dictators in Libya and Syria.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is blocking the FSA from getting heavy weapons that would destroy Assad’s tanks, helicopters, and artillery.

NATO declined to invoke the “self-defense” clause of its charter after Syria shot down two Turkish planes a few months ago.

These actions have produced a one-sided slaughter in Syria, not a civil war where both sides are equally aided by rival powers. Obama does not want the FSA to win and destroy Assad’s precious state machine, so he gave a green light to Assad’s murderous campaign against his own people:

I have, at this point not ordered military engagement in the situation, but, the point that you made about chemical and biological weapons is critical. It is an issue that doesnât just concern Syria, it concerns our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us, we cannot have a situation where chemical and biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people… a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus, that would change my equation.

Here, Obama raised the bar for U.S. intervention so high to make it impossible for Assad to cross the “red line” and change U.S. imperialism’s calculus. Assad now has Obama’s go-ahead to use chemical weapons on Syrians, just not “a whole bunch” of them. Zyklon-B is a-ok by Washington, just not “a whole bunch of” it.

So Western progressives who have been warning of U.S. military action against Syria ever since the Assad regime first blamed Syria’s protests on “foreign plots” and been dead wrong for 18 months straight can heave a sigh of relief. The U.S. will not be attacking Assad’s military any time soon. The slaughter of the Syrian people will continue unabated without meaningful outside interference. Once again, the Allies have refused to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz — but this time, with the support of Western progressives.